Some places experience more commotion around fresh water than others. Ohio is one such place. To see how is to glimpse how complicated our relationship with water can be.
Memorably, in June, 1969 sparks from a passing train set the Cuyahoga River on fire. The river that runs through Cleveland had long been fouled by industrial waste, and it had gone up in flames at least a dozen times before, but this last blaze came at a time of rising general concern about the environment.
The image of a river on fire helped stir a range of pollution-control actions across the nation that included the creation of federal and state environmental protection agencies and the passage of the landmark federal Clean Water Act in 1972.
The Cuyahoga eventually got better. Last year – the 50th anniversary of the 1969 fire – the Ohio EPA declared that fish caught in the river were safe to eat.
A happy turn of events. But not all is happy around the waters of this one state.
Last year, voters in Toledo established a Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The action -- coming in the wake of a massive toxic algae bloom that disrupted the lives of the half-a-million people who drink the lake’s water – essentially gave the public guardianship over the lake, meaning that citizens could represent the lake in court.
The Lake Erie Bill of Rights – the first such act in the United States -- was in the spirit an international Rights of Nature movement that grants personhood to aspects of Nature. The action prompted a politician in New York to draft a similar measure that’s now in a legislative committee.
In Toledo, farmers had battled the Bill of Rights drive, worried that they’d wind up being held responsible for future algae blooms through fertilizer runoff from their lands. The chamber of commerce joined farmers in opposition, and Houston-based BP Corp. of North America donated more than $300,000 to their cause.
Still, 61 percent of Toledo voters backed the Bill of Rights ballot initiative in early 2019, only to hear a federal district court judge declare one year later – just last month -- that the measure was unconstitutionally vague.
The judge also ruled that the city lacked jurisdiction over the entire six million-acre lake.
“Lake Erie is not a pond in Toledo,” he wrote. “It is one of the five Great Lakes and one of the largest lakes on Earth, bordering dozens of cities, four states, and two countries.”
The judge suggested that Toledo consider a different approach: Restrict the use of phosphorous-heavy fertilizers in the city, a step that Madison, Wisconsin had successfully imposed a dozen years earlier.
Meanwhile last year Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, sensitive to problems with his state’s waters, announced a wide-ranging water-protection plan called H2Ohio.
The plan – backed by $1 billion of government money over the next 10 years and supported by both farm interests and conservationists – encourages farmers to modernize their uses of fertilizer, the fuel for algae blooms. Among other things the state would help pay for soil tests, and farmers would be asked to consider changing how they drain their lands and how they apply fertilizer so as to reduce nutrient run-off into the water.
H2Ohio money would also go into extending public water lines to neighborhoods that don’t now get public water.
Further, the plan would direct hundreds of millions of dollars into restoring wetlands – a significant step since Ohio, more than most other states over the years, has paved over and otherwise eliminated more than 90 percent of its wetlands. Among other things, the loss of wetlands has heightened the state’s vulnerability to flooding at a time of increasingly severe rains.
The H2Ohio initiative set the state on a progressive path – a clear break from the past when, far later than other jurisdictions, Ohio in 1988 got around to banning phosphate detergents, the cause of awful algae blooms in Lake Erie.
So, then, will all be well soon with Ohio’s waters?
Yes and no. The focus on fertilizer runoff has promise, but it’s a voluntary program, and experts believe that not enough is being done to hit phosphorous contamination targets for Lake Erie that US and Canadian interests previously set for 2025.
And, meanwhile, environmentalists in the southern part of the state are upset that a multi-state water commission decided last year to roll back longstanding pollution controls for the Ohio River, leaving it to locals to set their own rules.
So, as elsewhere, the story of water in the Buckeye State – a setting for nearly 30,000 streams and rivers and hundreds of miles of Lake Erie shoreline – has many chapters, some good and some not.
The story confirms the extent to which water – clean or not – is part of society’s alternately promising and uncertain relationship with Nature.